Quotes About Inspiration

Everyone doesn't have to do everything," she told me. "People forget you can also express yourself by what you choose to admire and support. I've had so much pleasure from beautiful and challenging things created by other people, things I could never make or do. I wouldn't trade that for anything.

I read to live. I read for life.

Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio W. H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts," from Collected Poems Jane Austen Russell Banks, Continental Drift Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, translated by Alison Anderson Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader The Holy Bible Elizabeth Bishop Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, translated by Natasha Wimmer

all over the world, the people always asked for the same thing: books. Sometimes even before medicine or shelter—they wanted books for their children.

everyone doesn't have to do everything." she told me ."people forget you can also express yourself by what you choose to admire and support. i've had so much pleasure from beautiful things created by other people, things i could never make or do.

Everyone doesn't have to do everything... People forget you can also express yourself by what you choose to admire and support. I've had so much pleasure from beautiful and challenging things created by other people, things I could never made or do. I wouldn't trade that for anything.

When we denigrate mediocrity, we discourage ourselves and others from trying new things. It would be great to be a great painter, but it's also great just to paint. Or sing or throw pots or knit scarves or play chess.

book called The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch,

Books focused her mind, calmed her, took her outside of herself;

remains for my family the perfect model of how you can be gone but ever present in the lives of people who loved you, in the same way that your favorite books stay with you for your entire life, no matter how long it's been since you turned the last page.

Really, whenever you read something wonderful, it changes your life, even if you aren't aware of it.

The Bite of the Mango,

Samuel Smiles's 1859 bestseller Self-Help (with illustrations of Character and Conduct).

I'd read in Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith,

I do believe that my Holy Grail of books could be out there—and I intend to keep reading until I find it. Of course, I'll keep reading after I do, too, because—well, because I love to read. I also believe that the Holy Grail of books won't be the greatest book ever written—I am certain there isn't such a thing. I think it will simply be a book that speaks perfectly to me at the moment I most need it and continues to speak to me for the rest of my life.

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch,

one of the things I learned from Mom is this: Reading isn't the opposite of doing; it's the opposite of dying.

A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in ... the edit." [ Ten rules for writing fiction (part two) , The Guardian, 20 February 2010]

It is better to write a bad first draft than no first draft at all.

I think with movies I am really connecting to the Joseph Campbell idea of the collective unconscious.

If you live in a ghetto and really want not to just change your life and your family's life but change your ghetto's life, make your ghetto a good neighbourhood, learn science try to be like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

If Apple's a technology company in the music industry, why can't somebody in the music industry make technology?

Not many people give you a vision of what the future will bring.